i need to think up better titles, part 2

by unanon at 12:15 PM on June 14, 2002

Anyway, in continuation of my last post, I did receive some scary news. I'm sure the more sane of you readers would have been shocked to read this. Basically, people from "certain countries" who arrive in the US will be given a prison-style welcome to the land of the free, before going through the whole experience again every time they get near some landmark or tourist trap.

Now, my first reaction to the news was "will they use lube?" Those of you who read my old site would know that my family and I had planned to spend last January in Mexico and Texas, where a small but sizable chunk of my extended family live. I personally was going to see whether the tequila in Mexico really does come with the worm in the bottle. While I usually tend to avoid eating worms, I figure that the worm can't taste any worse than beer, and has more alcohol to boot, and I'd be more willing to down the worm than drunk can after can of beer in a vain attempt to get drunk, and just end up needing to pee a lot instead. Sure, I'd be under the legal drinking age in the states, but if Jenna Bush can do it and get little more than a slap on the wrist, I'm sure the worst that would happen to me is a one-way ticket to camp tropical justice, where I can work on my tan all day long, or worse still, being made to star in an infomercial for nude pictures of Linda Tripp. But I digress.

After some long nights and longer phone calls, we decided against it, because, being of middle-eastern appearance, we fears that such a thing would happen. The fact that the very same thing happened to my dad 23 years ago, at the time of the revolution in Iran made the possibility if being detained at airports for "security reasons" all the more salient. This happened as he was taking a post-college 'round the world' trip with friends. Every time he stepped off a plane, he'd be detained while the customs services of various countries took days to discover that he has a beard because he is simply a tubby, lazy bastard. The fact that middle eastern-looking people were already being denied onboard flights for no reason other than their appearance since September 11 helped make the decision for us. For the record, we ended up driving to Melbourne, and Adelaide, which has a really good rave scene.

Of course, the obvious discomfort of accommodating somebody's hand in my rectum must pale in comparison to what my relatives over in the US must be experiencing. Many of them are more American than most Americans. If you ever wanted to see mindless patriotism at it's nuttiest, look no further than my cousins. They all waited many years and jumped through hoops to get their green cards, and did so patiently. A number of them are artists, and one is even a co-ordinator of security at an airport. (The US apparently has a shortage of artists and security guards. Who knew?) They now face the prospect of being treated like potential criminals, all because of accident of birth.

This all makes me wonder about the new guy they have caught. This guy, apparently, was raised in New York, and was Hispanic, or something of that nature. He appears to be detained because he went to Pakistan, which is not something too many Hispanic people do apparently. Does this mean that every Hispanic person in New York now becomes a potential terrorist? How about every Hispanic person in the USA? How about people returning from Pakistan? Hell, even people in Karachi airport on transit would have to be detained. It'd probably be a lot easier to divert all flights to the US from Pakistan to Cuba. All I hope is that some paranoid security guard doesn't decide my mum could be a potential terrorist when she goes to board her flight to Melbourne this Sunday. I don't want to see the look on the guard's face when he or she realises that the thing that showed up as a deadly pair of nail clippers on the x-ray machine is just the metal thingies holding her girdle together.